Building a website is only half the job – promoting it is the other half, and it never really ends. Luckily there are several things you can do to make your site promote itself, freeing you to do more relationship-building and hands-on promotion.

Here are some things you can add to the site to encourage people to visit and share what they find there.

Add a Tell a Friend feature

Sure, you can encourage people to tell their buddies about your site, but you might as well make it easy for them. Create a tell-a-friend feature that makes it simple for them to forward your site or a resource they found there to a multitude of readers at once.

Add a Link to Us page

Empower your visitors to create links to your site, replete with your site icon, on their site with a Link to Us page, available on every page. Provide the HTML coding they’ll need, and make sure it includes well-formed SEO links (including a full title, alt and anchor text). Put together a variety of text links, images of different sizes and everything someone would need to link back to you.

Maintain an engaging blog

The single best way to build engaging information on your website that attracts a following is to start a blog. I mean, you’re reading this right now, aren’t you? So give people a reason to keep coming back. Just make sure it’s tightly focused and worth reading.

Encourage people to follow your social media

Once you’ve got a blog, tell people how to follow it. The beauty of blogs are RSS feeds, which let people receive updates of articles as soon as they’re posted. (See how to get updates of this blog.) This is the same for Twitter updates, which is really a microblog, and any social networking accounts you have, like Facebook.

Present tools for sharing

If you have an article-rich site, give people tools for sharing your resources with their friends. Try some little buttons like this:

Ask people to spread the word

Remind people, again and again, to tell their friends about you. Sooner or later, they’ll act on your request.

Add a calendar

Show people you have stuff going on that’s worth tracking. Your calendar might have trainings, appearances, fund drives, special events – surely you’re doing something that people can react with.

You should never stop promoting your site once you’ve built it, but invest smartly in tools that do the heavy lifting for you. While you focus on other promotional activities, your investment can multiply.

You also may enjoy the following related articles:

First Step in Promoting a New Site: Directories

Working Your Out-of-Office Reply While You’re Away

Three Top Reasons People Aren’t Using Your Site

Three No-Brainers for Website Promotion

Imagine buying a new car, driving it home and never once putting gas in it. It just sits there in the garage, blocking access to your gardening tools. Ridiculous waste of money, right? That’s tantamount to building a new website and never updating it, upgrading it or promoting it. It just sits there and blocks your opportunity to purvey a message, boost membership or garner support.

Upgrading and updating are iterative processes that you might begin after a few weeks of living with your new website. But the first thing you should do off the chute is start promoting like crazy. One of the easiest ways to do that is to submit your website to search engines and directories.

The reason is two-fold. First, you want to make sure your name appears where people are looking. If you’re a synagogue or church, you want potential members to find you if they’re shopping around by browsing through local directories (”Massachusetts synagogues”).

Secondly, generating links is a great way to to boost your reach in search engines, and search engines are the top way people find information online. You need to follow some proven search engine optimization, or SEO, techniques to help your name move to the top of the list when someone might be trying to find you in a search engine.

Many directories charge a fee, and these are of questionable value. Focus on free listings, especially those in your community. Take a day or so to sit down and find every directory that relates to your organization, and then submit your site to each one. Here’s a list of free directory submission pages to get you started.

Google Open Directory
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

Yahoo! Directory Listings
https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/reference/instructions

Yelp
http://www.yelp.com/

I’m asked many times by clients what kind of social media they should invest in. It’s a tough question to answer, largely because it depends on what kind of social media makes sense to the people who you’re trying to reach. That’s why the best idea is to ask them directly.

Put together a survey, either printed or digital, and distribute it to your constituency or congregation to see where they’d like to hear from you in terms of social media. Ask them what kinds of social media they currently use, and then ask them how much and often they use them. It’ll give you a good idea of their capabilities and tendencies.

You can also make a pretty good educated guess. If your constituency is made up of largely older people, you’re probably best off seeing if you can transition from a printed bulletin to an electronic newsletter. If your audience is young and hip, hit them where they go: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube.

Also check out our social media survey.

Many people will take the time to set a simple auto-response to go out when someone writes them an e-mail. It’s usually something like “I will be out of the office until Tuesday, 4/14. If necessary, I can be reached at …” Talk about a missed opportunity!

Why not get a little fancy with this message and do a bit of promotion while you’re at it? After all, you have to write something there anyway, how about adapting one of these lines for your next out-of-office reply:

1. I’m out of town and can’t respond to your message until next Tuesday. While you’re waiting for me, check out our blog at http://talance.com/blog
2. I’m not checking e-mail while I’m out of the office until Tuesday, but I’m still Twittering! You can get a daily dose of what I’m doing at http://twitter.com/talance
3. I’m out of the office until Tuesday, but I’ll be celebrating our latest website launch the whole time I’m away. Check out http://massmentors.org and tell me what you think.

The best part? You don’t have to do any extra work to do a little promotion.

With some mighty big funders losing money because of the bad economy and the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, this is a good time for nonprofits embrace grassroots fundraising. This, after all, is how the president-to-be was able to raise such an enormous sum: lots of people making moderate donations.

If you’re not raising funds online, do it! Too many websites make it too hard – or impossible - to give online. Here are the top 10 transgressions I’ve seen many times. Learn from these mistakes.

1. No Donate or Give button. Don’t be shy. People want to donate. How will they know to if you don’t ask?
2. Donate/Give button not big enough. Make it easy for them to see a donate button. Big red or orange buttons are good.
3. No way to pay online. Sometimes those big buttons lead to an e-mail or snail mail address. People sit at their computers with a credit card in hand, ready to pay. Our clients use our shopping cart technology to collect donations, sell T-shirts and mugs or accept reservations for events – all classified as fundraising. That’s the best return on your investment, and there are plenty of free services out there too.
4. Clashing systems. Make sure your fundraising efforts dance together, not bump into each other. Coordinate direct mail campaigns with online campaigns, with a goal of moving more online. It’s vastly cheaper.
5. Neglecting other technology. You can ask for support though e-mail, blog, Facebook, and other places in addition to your website.
6. Paranoia. I’m always a little surprised to hear how many people think it’s unsafe to ask for money online. True, nothing is completely safe from fraud, and you shouldn’t be taking credit card numbers through e-mail, but donating through a secure website is much safer than a check in the mail.
7. Asking for support once. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
8. Not rallying the troops. Tell others to tell their friends about how they donated. Give them a button for their website that links back to yours. Have your supporters help by spreading the word.
9. Not tracking. There are great tools out there that you can use that track the number of people who’ve visited your site and what they did when they got there. Make sure you keep records of traffic and compare it month by month to see how your online fundraising campaign is doing.
10. Bad publicity. Asking for money isn’t enough. You need to market your campaign. Aim for media coverage, write about new campaigns in all of your literature and partner with other organizations for added punch.

Innovation is one of the first things on the chopping block during tough financial times. Understandable, especially if organizations are being asked to fund something that’s risky. But innovation has a partner up there with its neck also extended, which is marketing, I’m very sorry to note.

What many people don’t realize is that marketing is necessary for keeping your organization afloat, no matter what your organization is. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing fame says, “Every business is a marketing business.” That goes the same for nonprofits, because you’re constantly trying to stay in front of the people who believe in your cause.

And what is a website if not one of the cheapest forms of marketing out there?

“The Internet is the cheapest and most successful form of marketing around,” says Micah Sachs, Director of Web Strategy at InterfaithFamily.com, who I interviewed for an article that will appear in an issue of The Forward next month. He’s been using bargain basement web marketing to great effect. Namely, he’s instituted a few changes in SEO (search engine optimization) and Google Adwords.

After InterfaithFamily gave itself a modest marketing makeover about a year ago, its traffic immediately increased 63 percent. It’s seen a steady increase, and Sachs said that up through June 2008, he never saw less than a 40 percent increase.

Here are a few of the easy steps he followed to boost his traffic:

1. Give each page a unique title
2. Create URLs that match the article titles
3. Add article keywords on web pages

At first, it required a significant time investment, and he company brought in an intern who spent about 40 hours per week for 10 weeks writing in descriptions, adding keywords and generally optimizing the site’s old articles.

“But now it’s part of our culture,” he says. “Any time we create anything new on the site, we don’t even think of something as additional work. We create keywords, create title tags. It’s just a part of what we do.”

Once your organization has figured out a system for creating these three main changes, an increase in web visibility should come naturally and simply.

“This is all stuff that’s simple and straightforward,” he says. “It’s amazing how many sites of major orgs aren’t search-engine optimized. It will cost them no money; they just have to ask their webmaster to make some changes.”

There could be a million reasons people aren’t using your site - maybe it’s summer vacation time, maybe there’s something going on in the news that’s diverting their attention, maybe you don’t even have a site yet - but I think there are three main barriers that keep people from visiting a site.

Here are those top three reasons and what you can do to remedy them.

The Problem: You don’t know your site visitors.

Which is to say, you either haven’t found your target audience, or if you have, you haven’t reflected that on your website.

The Solution: Find your target audience/market.

This Target Market Worksheet (in PDF format) from Entrepreneur is a valuable exercise for any nonprofit.

The Problem: You don’t understand your site visitors.

A big part of making sure people are using your site is understanding what they do when they get there. If you pay attention with some analytics tools, you can learn a lot about where people are going or not going when they hit your web address.

The Solution: Get hold of some analytics tools and start using them.

Some of my favorites:

ClickTale

Clicky

Crazy Egg

The Problem: Your site visitors don’t know or understand you.

Sometimes it’s as simple as they can’t find your website. Or maybe when they get to your site, they can’t figure out what to do there.

The Solution: Start promoting your website (a topic I visit often in this blog), and start to apply some usability techniques.

Learn more at this webinar.

We just hosted a webinar with some friends of ours at Dinkum Interactive about search engine optimization. It was great and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback so far.

One of the biggest lessons we addressed during the presentation was the importance of looking beyond just the technology and just the marketing when it comes to coaxing people to find you on the Internet. It’s much more than having the right tools or writing the right copy. So-called search engine optimization is a full-on effort that ensures that you’re always promoting your company and making sure that people are always learning about you.

But there are a few things you can do to help coax search engines to move you up their web pages. One is clean URLs.

Every page on your website has its own address, or URL. Search engines, as do people, like to see these addresses when they make sense. So they’ll avoid cataloging those pages with such addresses as

http://www.talance.com/aspweb/ur123/do/results?firsttime=y&
set=search&referer=&edition=&sortResultsBy=TopicRelevance
=9644205E04CF9DBF1B850C0219204572_1188832070933&
urn=urn%3Abigchalk%3AUS%3BBCLib%3Bdocument%3B112707510

And prefer addresses that give a clear indication of the information on the page, such as:

http://www.talance.com/about-us

This can be done automatically if your CMS (content management system) has clean URLs installed. Then it will read the page’s title and make that the URL, rather than a mechanical string.
Try it out, and see if suddenly more people are able to find you online.

How do you reach your constituency when they’re teenagers, don’t use e-mail, aren’t on Facebook and the cost of texting is prohibitively expensive? It’s a good question that came in to me today.

One option is to set up a Twitter account and start promoting it to your audience. This is a service that you can access from your PC and send short messages that your teens can subscribe to. Think mini-blog. Check out this handy list of questions from Twitter’s site.

Otherwise, most cell phone providers give e-mail addresses to their subscribers, with their cell phone number at the beginning and their provider name at the end (something like 1235551212@verizon.com). It’s generally free to receive e-mailed text messages for them and free for you to send them. Ask your teens who they have service with, and this will go a long way to connecting with them.

When going over the designs for his website, a client of mine said, “If we put our newsletter on our website, why do we need to e-mail it to people too?”

My answer: “Because they don’t know it’s there!”

It’s a very common question, and a common misconception. Just because you build a website doesn’t mean that anyone knows it’s there. And it’s not a guarantee they’ll come.

In fact, people are fickle. You have to beat them over the head to make them visit your site, and then you have to make it easy for them to read your site, navigate your site and anticipate what they’re looking for.

All this takes a lot of research into knowing your audience and working with a company that understands the way humans interact with technology, but here are a few tips and tools you can follow to help bring people to your site and help keep them there:

Learn SEO. Make sure you write the copy on your site to attract the most people and the most search engines with search engine optimization (SEO). We’re hosting a free online seminar on this topic on August 5, 2008, so sign up to learn how.

Send a Newsletter. If you didn’t have an electronic newsletter before, get one now. Publishing news regularly gives you a chance to connect with your audience and connect to them while they’re at their computer. That’s the best time for them to click through to your website. We build newsletters into our content management systems, but many independent companies provide powerful newsletter tools, such as Constant Contact.

Advertise Widely and Often. Advertise your site everywhere. On your invoices, business cards, sticky notes, voice mail recordings, newsletters - everywhere. Slap your URL on it. VistaPrint is one of many companies that provides cheap promotional materials that you can use for advertising.